Sunday, May 07, 2006

Open Document Format Gets ISO Approval

The Open Document Format has been approved as an international standard by the International Standards Organization, a move that supporters say will serve as a springboard for the adoption and use of ODF around the world.

OpenDocument Format Alliance is a coalition of more than 35 organizations from across the world whose goal is to enable governments and organizations to have direct management and greater control over their documents. The alliance—whose supporters include many of Microsoft's Linux and open-source foes such as Corel, IBM, Novell, OpenOffice.org, Opera Software, Oracle, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems—is essentially positioning the XML-based ODF (OpenDocument Format) as the alternative to other document formats like Microsoft's OpenXML, which is the new file format that will be used in Office 2007 when it ships later this year.

Industry should thank to Sun Microsystems for giving up control of the format and allowing it to evolve in a real community way in OASIS under an open process.

The standard will give vendors a baseline for file format and allow them to compete on implementations rather than competing on incompatible standards. This will give customer options to choose from different products without worrying about incompatibility of files.

This event is an important step in the effort to help customers to find a better way to preserve, access and control their documents now and in the future without having to depend on a single vendor.